Isohunt.com In a shocking turn of the tables this September, the Isohunt webmaster is counter-suing the Canadian music industry. He is claiming that previous copyright violation suits against him were unfounded, and that he is entitled to have his legal expenses recovered. Read the entire story at http://www.isohunt.com.

Demonoid.com is back online! After legal conflicts in April of 2008, they have reestablished themselves outside of the USA. Demonoid is still a private community, and members are held liable for any leeching that their invited friends do in this community. If you are lucky enough to get a Demonoid membership, invite your friends carefully, lest you lose your own membership.

Mininova.org Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.

YouTorrent.com Still in beta testing format, this new torrent site claims to be the largest legal torrent search engine today. Accordingly, the result sets are much smaller than the “pirate” counterparts, but definitely try this site for yourself.

Torrentbox.comFYI: like Isohunt, Torrentbox is being sued by the MPAA as of February 28, 2006. The days for this fine search engine may be numbered.

Torrentreactor.to (Torrentreactor has made a comeback from a hijacking and an uncooperative hosting service. They have moved to a different server setup and a Tonga country domain outside the USA. Read the details on their home page.)

TorrentTyphoon.com(this database is up for sale, if anyone is interested in running a torrent service)

Torrentspy.com March 24, 2008: Torrentspy has voluntarily closed its doors. Instead of conforming to the American court mandates to change their privacy policies, the Torrentspy team has opted instead to cease operations. A sad day for downloaders everywhere.

Special mention: NowTorrents.com (A clean and fast user interface, and some great cross-reference linking helps you browse books and other media related to your movies.)

Special mention: ShareTV.org (ShareTV is dedicated to sharing television episodes and entire TV series. Find “24”, “Heroes”, and “Lost” episodes here. Special thanks to Chris R. for telling us about his web site.)

Special mention: Torrent-Finder.com (This site has been submitted recently by three readers as their personal favorite torrent search engine. It “meta-searches” 159 torrent sites as of this writing. Special thanks to Dina, Suresh, and ChaOSthEory for this submission.)

It has been a good year for The Pirate Bay. The number of visitors spiked, despite efforts in Denmark and Italy to block access the site. Last month, The site celebrated its 5th anniversary, just after it broke the 25 million peers mark. At any given point in time, more than 25 million peers actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker.

Compete rank 885 / Alexa rank 117 / 2007 #3

Mininova has seen a steady rise in visitors in 2008, and more than 3 billion torrents were downloaded from the site in the past 12 months. In addition to user uploaded content, the Mininova team has started to focus more on premium publishers with their content distribution platform.

Compete rank 1,225 / Alexa rank 79 / 2007 #1

Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA and CRIA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. This year they partnered with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo, and just like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt added SSL encryption to the site, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor users’ activities.

Compete rank 1,106 / Alexa rank 200 / 2007 #2

Torrentz.com, one of the oldest torrent sites around, celebrated its 5th anniversary in July. The site added a “verified torrents” feature this year, and inspired many other meta-search engines to do the same. Last month a “hacker” caused some problems after it took over the torrentz domain, but luckily this issue was resolved in a few hours.

Compete rank 2,039 / Alexa rank 220 / 2007 #4

TorrentReactor redesigned and optimized the site throughout 2008, which resulted in a significant increase in visitors. In addition, the TorrentReactor launched TorrentPrivacy, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously.

Compete rank 3,762 / Alexa rank 625 / 2007 #5

In 2007, SumoTorrent quickly settled itself among the top torrent sites, and traffic continued to increase this year. The pop-ups and redirects are new though, and don’t make it one of the most convenient sites to browse.

Compete rank 4,737 / Alexa rank 989 / 2007 #10

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year either, but for BitTorrent sites that is usually a good thing. Traffic seems to be stable, although the site is not growing as fast as the other BitTorrent sites in this list.

Compete rank 4,300 / Alexa rank 1,126 / 2007 #7

In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision – and to ensure the privacy of their users – TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic, but still, it managed to make out top 10 list last year. March 2008 TorrentSpy owner Justin decided to shut down completely, and in May his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it will appeal.

BitTorrent’s popularity is growing every day. Despite efforts from anti-piracy outfits such as the MPAA and IFPI, torrent sites continue to grow traffic wise, and there is no sign that this trend will be brought to a halt anytime soon.

We decided to compile a list of the 25 most popular BitTorrent sites, and see how their (relative) popularity has grown over the past three months. Out of the 25 sites in the list, 21 improved their ranking in Alexa’s list of most popular sites on the Internet.

There are a few changes in the top 10 compared to the list of 2007’s top torrent sites. Mininova is still leading the bunch, but The Pirate Bay is now in second place, in front of isoHunt. Torrentportal and TorrentReactor traded places as well, the sites are now 7th and 9th respectively.

YouTorrent is the only newcomer, and it’s really impressive that the site made it into the top 25 only 2 months after its launch.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is not perfect. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.